A Step-by-Step Framework for Auditing Your Tech Company's SEO

This guide is written for two audiences: in-house marketing teams at B2B and B2C tech companies who manage SEO internally, and CTOs or engineering leads who have been handed an SEO problem and need a structured way to evaluate it.

If you already have an SEO agency running campaigns, this framework helps you ask better questions in your next review. If you're deciding whether to hire one, the audit output gives you a concrete scope of work to evaluate proposals against.

You don't need to be an SEO specialist to complete most of this audit. Some sections — particularly JavaScript rendering diagnosis and log file analysis — benefit from technical depth. For those, we flag where a specialist adds the most value versus where a non-technical marketer can self-assess confidently.

This guide is diagnostic, not prescriptive. It tells you what to look for and how to score what you find. Implementation steps are covered separately in the tech company SEO checklist.

Tech company websites fail in search for four distinct reasons, and they rarely fail for just one. A useful audit examines each layer in sequence, because lower-layer problems can mask or invalidate what you find higher up.

Layer 1: Crawlability and Indexation

Google can only rank pages it can find, crawl, and index. Tech sites frequently block their own content through misconfigured robots.txt files, noindex tags applied too broadly, or JavaScript-rendered content that Googlebot can't process reliably. Start here. If critical pages aren't indexed, nothing else matters yet.

Layer 2: Technical Performance

Core Web Vitals, page speed, mobile usability, and HTTPS status all influence how Google evaluates pages that pass the indexation check. Tech company sites often carry technical debt — legacy JavaScript bundles, third-party script bloat, or image-heavy product pages — that creates performance gaps competitors don't have.

Layer 3: Content and Keyword Alignment

This layer examines whether the right pages are targeting the right terms with the right intent. Many tech sites rank well for brand terms but have almost no organic visibility for category-level searches. Others have product pages optimized for features, when buyers are searching for problems and outcomes.

Layer 4: Authority and Backlink Profile

Domain authority accumulates through links from relevant external sites. Tech companies often have strong PR coverage but thin editorial links in their specific product category. This layer assesses whether your link profile supports the rankings you're targeting — and flags toxic links that may be suppressing them.

Crawlability Check

Use Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to crawl your site. Compare the crawl output against your XML sitemap. Any URL in your sitemap that returns a non-200 status code is a problem. Flag pages with noindex tags that should be ranking — this is a common issue after CMS migrations or developer changes made without SEO review.

For JavaScript-heavy sites, run a rendering comparison: crawl once with JavaScript disabled, once with it enabled. Pages that appear only in the second crawl are invisible to crawlers that don't render JS, which affects more search engines than just Google.

Technical Performance Check

Pull Core Web Vitals data from Google Search Console's Page Experience report. Focus on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — these are the most commonly failed metrics for tech product pages. Cross-reference with PageSpeed Insights for specific recommendations tied to your real URLs, not lab simulations.

Content and Keyword Alignment Check

Export your top 50 pages by organic impressions from Search Console. For each, identify the primary keyword Google is associating with the page (the query driving the most impressions). Compare that keyword to the page's stated intent. Mismatches — where the page is optimized for one thing but ranking for another — signal content gaps or cannibalization.

Run your target keywords through a gap analysis against two or three direct competitors. Keywords they rank for that you don't represent either missed content opportunities or authority gaps.

Authority and Backlink Profile Check

Use Ahrefs or Semrush to pull your backlink profile. Sort by referring domain quality and look for two things: relevance (are the linking sites in your industry or adjacent categories?) and concentration (are most links coming from one or two domains?). Concentrated profiles are fragile. Also flag any links from link schemes, low-quality directories, or irrelevant foreign-language sites — these occasionally suppress performance.

Not every issue you find in an audit deserves equal urgency. A severity scoring system prevents your team from spending three weeks fixing image alt text while a crawl block keeps your pricing page out of the index.

Score each issue across two dimensions: impact (how much organic traffic or conversion is at risk?) and effort (how long does a fix take?). Plot these on a simple matrix:

• High impact, low effort: Fix immediately. Examples include broken sitemap entries, missing canonical tags on paginated content, or title tags exceeding 60 characters on high-priority pages.
• High impact, high effort: Schedule and resource properly. Examples include site architecture restructuring, JavaScript rendering overhauls, or a full content refresh for a product category with weak rankings.
• Low impact, low effort: Batch these into a maintenance sprint. They're not urgent but they accumulate into meaningful improvements over time.
• Low impact, high effort: Deprioritize or defer. These consume engineering cycles for minimal SEO return.

In our experience working with tech companies, the highest-impact category consistently produces issues teams didn't know existed — specifically around indexation and keyword alignment — rather than the technical performance issues that tend to dominate developer attention.

Document your severity scores in a shared audit tracker. This becomes the briefing document for any agency or contractor you bring in, and it gives internal stakeholders a clear picture of SEO health without requiring them to interpret raw tool data.

You don't need every SEO tool. Most tech company audits can be completed thoroughly with a focused stack:

• Google Search Console — Free, authoritative data on indexation, Core Web Vitals, search queries, and manual actions. This is the starting point for every layer of the audit.
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Desktop crawler that audits on-page elements, crawl depth, redirect chains, and response codes. The free version handles sites up to 500 URLs; paid covers enterprise-scale sites.
• Ahrefs or Semrush — Either works for backlink analysis, keyword gap analysis, and competitor benchmarking. Both have learning curves; pick one and use it consistently across audits so you can track trends.
• PageSpeed Insights / Lighthouse — Google's own performance measurement tools. Use PageSpeed Insights for field data; Lighthouse for lab diagnostics when diagnosing specific pages.
• Sitebulb — Stronger than Screaming Frog for visualizing site architecture and rendering issues, particularly useful for JavaScript-heavy tech sites.
• Log file analysis tools (optional) — If you have access to server logs, tools like Screaming Frog Log File Analyser or Splunk reveal which pages Googlebot actually crawls versus which it ignores. Valuable for large sites with crawl budget concerns.

Avoid audit paralysis from too many tools. The data they surface is only useful when it maps back to the four-layer framework — otherwise you're collecting findings without a diagnostic lens to interpret them.

This framework covers what a capable internal team can assess independently. There are situations where the audit itself requires specialist input before you can confidently interpret what you're seeing.

Bring in an SEO specialist if:

• Your site is heavily JavaScript-rendered (React, Angular, Vue) and you're unsure whether Googlebot is processing your content correctly — this requires rendering expertise most marketing teams don't have in-house
• You've experienced a sudden, unexplained traffic drop and can't identify the cause after reviewing Search Console data and ruling out a Google core update
• Your audit reveals structural issues (site architecture, internal linking, canonicalization) that require both SEO judgment and engineering coordination to fix safely
• You're planning a major site migration and want an audit baseline before and after, with someone accountable for flagging SEO risks in the migration plan
• You've completed the audit but lack confidence in prioritization — knowing what's wrong is half the problem; knowing what to fix first requires pattern recognition across many sites

A professional audit also provides documentation that internal SEO recommendations often lack — something that matters when you're making the case to engineering leadership or a board for resource allocation. If you're at this point, it's worth getting an outside perspective on your findings before committing to a fix roadmap.